Staircase scheduler v7.8

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This is a scheduler policy rewrite designed to be interactive by design without tweaks or tuning and be lean and extensible for all sorts of settings. (see previous announcements for more detail).

Patches (including incrementals from previous versions) against 2.6.7 can be downloaded from:
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2.6.7

For those with -ck kernels, the ck patchset was updated to 2.6.7-ck4 with no other changes to remain in sync with the staircase scheduler:
http://kernel.kolivas.org

Version 7.7 proved to be very stable so this version introduces some planned improvements. So far no issues have shown up in testing, and performance appears better.

Changes:
- - Yield logic made robust. Tasks that yield go after everything else, but once scheduled are seen as their normal priority - lots of applications use yield and this makes them behave a lot better.
- - Uninterruptible sleep has no effect on burst during interactive mode - this improves the responsiveness under I/O load
- - The 'non-interactive' and 'compute' mode is now much stricter about cpu distribution
- - Code cleanups

Patch not attached for brevity of email size.

7 files changed, 283 insertions(+), 610 deletions(-)

Comments, questions, patches and testing welcome,
Con

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